Tag Archives: dukkah

Two words almost never seen paired together: quick and favas. Yet, both apply to this week’s Lazy Man’s Fava Bean Salad with Spring Greens and Pecorino. In retrospect, we might have called it Romantic Man’s (or Woman’s) Fava Bean Salad because it’s just the sort of thing that two people comfortable with bumping hips in a kitchen can make together for their own romantic lunch. The salad makes 4 servings, but these can be stretched if you’re serving it as a starter to, say, grilled lamb or fish.

Three or four summers ago I was standing in water up to my knees on a sandbar known as Horseshoe Shoal in the middle of Barnstable Harbor, that long shark-shaped body of water that swims between the shores of Sandy Neck to the north and the town of Barnstable to the south on Cape Cod. As I watched, a flock of seabirds raced down the channel that passes between the sandbar and Sandy Neck. The birds swooped and cried, strafing a line across the water with their beaks as precise as a squadron of P-51 Mustangs. Then I saw it, a deep slate discoloration below the channel surface, an undulating gray movement that fragmented into hundreds of individual fish as it flashed by me. I wasn’t the only one to take notice. Small boats stopped in the channel, people rising to stand, hands shading eyes. “Blues!” a man cried, waving and pointing. It was August and the bluefish were running. For anglers and eaters on Cape Cod, only striped bass equal the pleasures of bluefish. Stripers taste more delicate, but bluefish fight harder. This week’s dish: Bluefish with Dukkah, Tomatoes and Garlic Yogurt.

Ceci ce n’est pas une poste. This is not a post–it’s a reminder of what you can do with dukkah. In this case, breakfast: steel-cut oats with Greek yogurt, diced beets, a soft-boiled egg and dukkah. If I’d had leftover roasted carrots, or a little braised fennel, or some kale… well, you get the picture. You get a whole grain and a vegetable with some protein under your belt and you haven’t even left the house yet. Don’t bother clicking on the MORE link. There is no more. This is it. Ken

We’re going to switch things up this week for Pan-Roasted Cauliflower with Dukkah. Normally you read a title like that and you think, Okay, this is about cauliflower, and then it’s about dukkah, whatever the hell that is. It would then follow that we’d spend a lot of time nattering on about cauliflower and give you a little dukkah sub-recipe (we’re not sophisticated enough to have a site that features sidebars… yet).

But this week the cauliflower is just a tease, a way of filling the seats inside the tent so we have an audience for dukkah, the exotic headliner who’s come all the way from Egypt, an aromatic mixture of toasted nuts and seeds gussied up with a few fragrant accents.